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Eyes Over Compton: How Police Spied On a Whole City
Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes with some concerning news from the Atlantic. From the article: "In a secret test of mass surveillance technology, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department sent a civilian aircraft over Compton, California, capturing high-resolution video of everything that happened inside that 10-square-mile municipality. Compton residents weren't told about the spying, which happened in 2012. 'We literally watched all of Compton during the times that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people,' Ross McNutt of Persistence Surveillance Systems told the Center for Investigative Reporting, which unearthed and did the first reporting on this important story. The technology he's trying to sell to police departments all over America can stay aloft for up to six hours. Like Google Earth, it enables police to zoom in on certain areas. And like TiVo, it permits them to rewind, so that they can look back and see what happened anywhere they weren't watching in real time."
So if you are sunbathing in your back yard, with 12 ft fences and no buildings visible, would you still presume privacy? Should you be mailed a ticket for sunbathing nude?
Learn to love Alaska
Hopefully, everyone involved with the Sheriff's department will be punished as hard as legally possible and possibly harder; but that seems unlikely to change the fact that 'power we could use' turns into 'power we just did use' with unpleasant regularity, and it's only reasonable to suspect that the cost of this sort of sensors-and-analysis package is only going to continue plummeting.
I'm sure that the insufferable 'if, hypothetically speaking, this level of surveillance would be legal if carried out by a magical force of zero-cost police officers with perfect memories and no need for sleep, it must be legal if carried out by any means whatsoever!' brigade will be by shortly; but their argument is ahistorical nonsense that ignores the real issue: most of your protection has always been logistical rather than legal. Now we are substantially reducing the logistical barriers and can reasonably expect to further reduce them in the near future. Any protections that you think would be a good idea will soon need to be explicitly legal; because the logistics will be increasingly trivial(possibly even self-financing, if you can sell ads somehow...)
You shouldn't be mailed a ticket for sunbathing nude regardless. Legislating against the human body is wrong on many levels.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I don't care about being recorded in public locations so long as I can also record everyone else.
I do, if it's the government. You should, because it makes it even more trivial for the government to harass its targets.
Looks like the future is going to be all about masks. But they'll just ban those, won't they?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Did you miss this bit?
"“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,”[The supervisor of the project at the sheriff's department Sgt. Douglas] Iketani said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush.”
That is...not exactly... the sort of attitude you want somebody with access to legalized violence to operate under. 'Yeah, we knew people wouldn't like the idea, so we just did it secretly instead. Listening to complaints is a total pain in the ass.' That alone strikes me as reason enough to clean house of everyone who gave it their approval, regardless of whether I thought the project was a good idea or not.
That's the land of the free and the home of the brave for you. So brave. So free.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
So if you are sunbathing in your back yard, with 12 ft fences and no buildings visible, would you still presume privacy? Should you be mailed a ticket for sunbathing nude?
A ticket? Not at all.
Rather, you should expect a SWAT team to haul you off to prison to await trial, where you will be found guilty of indecent exposure and forced to register as a Sex Offender for the rest of your life.
especially because its hard to ID a perpetrator from above the top of their head.
That's why we need to outlaw hair and head wear. It will be in the best interests of public safety if everyone had a prominent barcode tattooed to the top of their clean shaven, bald head to aid in identification by Law Enforcement surveillance drones.
You cannot seriously have an issue with the collection of such freely available imagery.
I do. Especially when it's the government doing it. We The People can easily restrict their activities if we choose to do so. The fact that "anybody" can do it doesn't mean we should let the government, with its virtually limitless resources and authority, do so.
What can the police do these days? Automatic license plate scanning? Red Light cameras? Automated Speed cameras? How about a FLIR camera on a helicopter?
I think that's all morally wrong. The fact that we allow it means we're not living up to the whole "land of the free and the home of the brave" thing.
What do you think the limit should be?
On the government's use of surveillance technology in public places.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
but that seems unlikely to change the fact that 'power we could use' turns into 'power we just did use' with unpleasant regularity
Their whole job is dealing with people who do crime and ask for forgiveness later. I don't condone what they are doing, but I can see how they could slip in that direction.
Which is why we have this thing called the United States Constitution, and why that constitution has an amendment (the 4th one, in fact) that deals with this sort of thing. That same constitution also has a concept of separation of powers, and defines what branch of government has what power. Law enforcement (under the executive branch) are only doing half of their job - they're sworn to uphold the law but the are ignoring the highest law, the constitution The judicial branch exists to prevent that, but they don't seem to be very good at doing the part of their job that involves upholding the constitution.
I imagine the only thing keeping it from going mainstream is the ability to make sure it doesn't record any pesky illegal/immoral activity by police/upper government officials. Kind of like that license plat reader system that was suspended indefinitely in Boston because a reporter was able to get a severely limited dataset from the system and still find "mistakes" (ignoring a stolen motorcycle that went past the same intersection regularly while using the system primarily to write tickets, ignoring the most dense area for overdue tickets the police employee parking lot, etc). Or like all of those police dash cams that have a tendency to have malfunctions/accidents when they might have caught "misconduct" (Hollywood Florida framing, Michael DeHerra Beating, Mark Byrge Arrest,Anthony Warren beating & the Prince George’s County, Maryland incident where SEVEN dashcams "malfunctioned" at once.)